“Come on, Lewis. Kill me. Kill me and go to Arcadia and kill all the others. You have to now. The woman you love is dead. Isn’t that a wonderful cliché? Now you can go avenge her, but deep down you’ll always know it was you who killed her. Just like you killed your little brother.”
“Shut up!” he barked. His hands shook again.
“You brought her to Vegas. Turns out she hadn’t been playing that much Rogue Horizon after all. You were the one who got brainwashed by accident. You answered the call and brought her right to us. She was the one we’d wanted all along. You’re a nobody Lewis, but her… she was really somebody, wasn’t she? A gaming celebrity, while you’re just a middling tech journalist.”
“I said shut the fuck up!”
“You wanted to be an astronaut. You wanted to explore the stars. But instead, you wound up living in the shadow of your rich, famous girlfriend. Tell me, were you ever stupid enough to think that you were important enough for us to target?”
“No,” he said. “It was never like that.”
“Then why did you pursue all this?”
“I just wanted to know.” His voice was softer now. “I wanted the truth.”
“Ah, truth.” Blackwell sighed. “Well, truth hurts Lewis.” He laughed again, but the pain was evident. He raised his head slowly, the evil smirk on his face illuminated by the full moon.
Lewis tilted his head to the side, suddenly realizing where he’d seen the man in black’s face before. And then in that instant, it all became perfectly, painfully clear to him.
He knew why the day had been so strange, why some things had been so familiar, why other things so illogical, and why it all kept going to shit. The realization hit him hard and he stumbled back, putting his hand to his head and suddenly laughing uncontrollably. It had been right in front of him the whole time. They’d played him well.
Blackwell looked confused. “What’s so funny? I don’t understand.”
“No,” Lewis said, calming down. “But I do. I can’t go back to Arcadia anymore.”
He frowned. “Why not?”
To the other man’s surprise, Lewis brought the pistol to the side of his head. “Because I never left.”
He pulled the trigger.
For a second, a brief jolt coursed through his entire body and everything went black.
It stayed that way for one very long moment.
Then two words in bright blue, computerized text flashed before him.
SIMULATION ENDED.
34
Lewis blinked multiple times and suddenly the blackness was gone; instead, a harsh glare shone down on him from above. It took him a few seconds for his eyes to adjust as everything around him came into focus. He lay floating on his back in a dimly-lit high-ceilinged room, with a bright white LED lamp shining straight at him. Directly in the center of his field of vision stood a large robotic arm contraption that aimed something down at his face. He’d never seen anything like it before.
He tried to sit up but found himself restrained at his wrists and ankles by waterproof Velcro straps that kept him spread-eagled like a Vitruvian man. Lewis managed to sit up enough to look down; he was dressed in some kind of silvery haptic wetsuit and, although he couldn’t see it, some form of silicone cap covered his head. The water tank he found himself in was the size of a small swimming pool.
“Congratulations,” came a familiar voice. “In the six months I’ve been doing this, you’re the first to wake up.”
Lewis turned his head to the side and saw Blackwell striding toward him. Gone were the black suit, fedora, and sunglasses that had constituted his ensemble before. Instead, he sported the same white lab-coat and khakis he had while he served as the technician for his and Jenna’s tour of Arcadia.
“Jesus Christ,” Lewis said, looking around the room. He couldn’t believe all this was happening. But he knew it was; dreams could seem shockingly vivid when you experienced them, but there was something different about the way the world looked and felt after you woke up that signified the change back to reality. As strange as his current predicament was, it actually made everything enormously clear.
“So this is what you do here. The game wasn’t enough to brainwash them, so you put them in a sensory deprivation tank to fuck with their minds using experimental neurotech.”
“Very good,” Blackwell said, pulling over a rolling chair from the nearby desk. Lewis saw a number of thin, advanced monitors placed before it on the wall. One displayed the Orbital Hotel & Casino, another the gas station at the side of US-93, and another featuring the astronaut watching him and his mother cry by the side of the forest road.
“What the hell is this thing?” Lewis said, gesturing up to the robotic arm with a flick of his eyes.
“This,” he replied, gesturing from the computer monitors to the deprivation tank and assorted equipment, “is the Dream Machine. Or, at least, a very early prototype of it. It’s nowhere near as seamless as the concept Zhao showed you in the office today.” He glanced at his watch. “Or yesterday now, I guess.”
“What time is it?”
“4:24 AM, Saturday, January 26th. We nabbed you just before midnight, and you’ve been in the simulation for just under four hours now.”
“How the hell did you do it? I mean, was that all… a game?”
“No, no. First, we place you in a stable, unconscious state using sedatives. When you were trying to escape with the flashdrive earlier tonight, you got hit pretty hard by Jackson –”
“Wait, Jackson?”
“Yeah, the security guard. You imagined him, Katelyn Caruso, and myself as men in black in the dream world. But I’ll get to that in a moment.” He was excited, clearly ecstatic to be telling one of his victims this after months of keeping it under wraps. “You almost woke up, but we stuck a needle in your neck, and you went back under pretty quickly. Then we changed you into the haptic suit, placed you in the pool here, and fitted the electrode cap over your head. It enables us to see what you’re thinking. We’ve had the ability to turn brainwaves into images for a while, this is simply the next step. And that thing above your head projects a beam onto your retinas, allowing us to bypass sight and send images directly into your mind. I’m able to keep your eyes open by sending certain signals into that part of your brain through the electrode cap. This tech has all come a long way in the past few years, and we’re not the only ones developing it. But the stuff we have here is better than anywhere else.”
“I don’t understand,” he said. “How did you create a fully working prototype with today’s technology? This level of VR only exists in science fiction.”
Blackwell shrugged. “As my favorite author William Gibson once said, ‘The future is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.’”
Lewis nodded. He was aware of developments in brain-computer interfaces and had considered writing an article on them at some point in the future, but had wanted to wait for them to get a little more advanced so the article would be more interesting to the average reader. Companies such as Neurable and Elon Musk’s Neuralink were currently working to take human-computer connectivity to the next level, and many more were beginning to follow suit. He’d been aware of efforts to create direct-to-brain VR long before Zhao had gloated about his future endeavors to try and impress Jenna. But just like many in the tech world, Lewis hadn’t believed this kind of tech would work until the late 2020s or even into the 2030s. Evidently, he’d been very, very wrong.